


The Ground Beneath My Feet

by tepidspongebath



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Captain America: The First Avenger, First Kiss, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Psychological Torture, World War II
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-31
Updated: 2015-10-06
Packaged: 2018-03-09 20:02:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3262586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tepidspongebath/pseuds/tepidspongebath
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Like they went in there and looked for the worst thing they could do to me. And they found it. And used it.” Bucky closed his eyes, turned away from Steve as if it hurt to look at him. “They took away the ground beneath my feet.”</i>
</p><p>What he suffered at HYDRA's hands leaves Bucky Barnes with a shaky hold on reality, and it doesn't help that Steve looks so <i>different</i>. Steve finds a way to help him through it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a gift for the friend who first introduced me to explicit yaoi doujinshi. Holy Hell, that was baptism by _fire_ , and I have never looked back.
> 
> This is also my first fic in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Do forgive me if I get things wrong, and I will not mind being pointed in the right direction!

Name, rank, and service number.

That was all they had a right to know, and, as far as Bucky Barnes was concerned, that was all they were going to get. Not that these bastards really seemed to care for information. If it was camp positions and battle plans and national secrets they wanted, they wouldn't have taken six batches of men - two within hours of each other - to their isolation ward. Sure, they asked him stuff when he came to, after injections and funny lights and (he suspected) minor surgery, but they asked like it was a matter of course: unhook Prisoner A from electric device, ask about supply lines, resume torture, take notes.

The fact that they had prisoners of war working on their munitions showed how much these HYDRA people cared for the Geneva Convention. And the living - or, rather, dying - conditions showed how they spit in its face. Bucky didn't think that he'd be doing himself (or the rest of the squad) any favors by bringing it up the next time they let him talk.

So he stuck to giving his name, rank, and service number, whatever they asked him, whatever they did to him, and hoped that he could keep to that until the end. (He asked, once, where the others were, the ones who'd been taken with him, but all that had earned him was a worried look from the little worried-looking doctor who gave the orders.)

He was doing OK; eventually, he learned that you could step away from the pain, watch it from the outside like it was happening to somebody else, so when he started to imagine he was back in Brooklyn, he thought it was his own mind doing that, and he threw himself into the memories of home. It happened more and more often, until it was so real he could _smell_ it. He was six years old again, all wide eyes and scabby knees, being told that, no, he couldn't go round to see his best friend because little Steve Rogers had died of scarlet fever during the night.

Bucky woke up gasping, straining against the straps that held him down. He knew it hadn't happened like that. Steve had beaten the disease in a month, and had come back to school impossibly paler and skinnier and, somehow, pluckier than ever. On the same afternoon, Bucky got into a scuffle with Tom Evans to keep the bigger kid from giving Steve a licking when Steve objected to the way Tom was "playing" with a kitten (because even at that age, Steve objecting to something meant him charging in like a lightweight avenging angel with asthma). _That_ was how it had happened, and Bucky would never forget it. But that other memory had been so horribly vivid, from the tone of his mother's voice as she said it to the gaping pit of grief that opened up where his stomach should be...

In the corner of his eye, he saw the doctor make a decisive mark in his notes.

So this was something the bastards were doing to him. Messing with his head, taking his brain and _playing_. Wiping his mind like a slate, and chalking in whatever they damn well wanted.

For a few brief heartbeats, the realization sat cold and overwhelming in his gut, and he felt the fight leaching out of him as men came to tighten his restraints. But not quite. They had made him think of Steve, and Steve...he would have gone down swinging. Bucky could at least try to do the same. He didn't know how HYDRA was doing it - it might have been all those shots, it might have been the rays from that thing they had pointing at his head - but he was damned if he was going to let them break him.

"James Barnes, sergeant," he said, clearly as he could, as the machine whirred and hummed back to life. He sucked in a breath, and prepared for the worst.

"3255..."

Images flooded his head, fuzzy at first and then suddenly clear, like a radio tuning in to a different station. None of them were good, and every single one of them involved Steve in the worst way possible.

Steve’s heart giving out during a particularly hard winter. Steve catching the tuberculosis that killed his mother. Steve getting pushed off a crowded sidewalk and into the path of a careening milk truck. Steve bleeding out alone in an alley somewhere because the reckless punk had taken on yet another street tough for disrespecting the war effort. And always, always Bucky was there watching and helpless to stop it from happening.

"...7038."

It went on and on until Bucky’s sense of time stretched out, twanged like a wooden ruler striking a desk, and, eventually, broke. He had no idea how long they kept him under, how long they gave him have his mind back, how long they let him sleep - _if_ they let him sleep. Every now and then, he’d catch a name, Erskine or Zola or Geist or Schmidt - of course, Johann Schmidt the madman behind HYDRA - and he’d know that every goddamn thing that had happened since the disaster at Azzano was real, but they’d start up their device again, push more needles into his veins, and reality would twist and warp and fracture.

He took to repeating his name, rank, and service number like a lifeline, like a prayer, because if he’d lived his life in any way that led up to his enlisting after Pearl Harbor, that was all down to Steve, and none of the images could be true, and his best friend had to be alive and safe back home, and that was all that mattered at this point.

And all of a sudden, there he was, saying his name, tearing off the leather restraints as though they were made of nothing more substantial than licorice.

"Steve?"

It was Steve, and it wasn’t - for one thing, he should have needed a stepladder to be that much taller than Bucky; for another, he was carrying a frankly ridiculous stars-and-stripes shield, who the hell did that? - but this version of him wasn't cold or dead or mangled, and Bucky was prepared to grab that with both hands and hold on for dear life.

He followed Steve through the factory, half sure he was dreaming (and maybe a quarter suspicious that he might be dying and this was a vision to help usher him into the next life) until he saw Schmidt peel his face off. The Red Skull. The _literal_ Red Skull. That sure as Hell woke him up.

Though if that hadn’t worked, the building coming down around their heads would have done the trick. Nothing, Bucky learned, explodes like a munitions factory. The sharp, strange smell of HYDRA’s new weapons made his eyes water, his eyebrows fizzled in the heat, sweat stung the marks and new scars on his skin, it felt like the noise was hammering his ears into his skull, and Bucky was sure they were going to die, but he’d been there before, he’d thought he was a goner at Azzano, all he’d been hoping for in the past few days was to die well, and, here he was, following Steve Rogers like he always had (like he knew he always would), and he would follow Steve through Hell and back and into death, if need be.

The floor was an inferno, impassable. The only way out was up and it was precarious, and once they were up, they had to go _across_. Steve helped him on to a steel girder spanning the distance, and as he put one unsteady foot in front of the other, Bucky started to believe that they might just make it out of there.

The girder gave beneath his weight with Steve still on the other side, shouting at him to go on, and the situation suddenly turned into the worst nightmare of all.

“No!” he screamed. “Not without you!”

And Steve _jumped_.


	2. Chapter 2

Steve Rogers owed Bucky his life. That was all there was to it.

It didn’t matter if you were talking about the innumerable times he’d stepped in when Steve started a fight he had no chance of winning (Bucky had learned early on that stepping in was the only way to stop those fights, since Steve only let himself be hauled away if he was unconscious); or the nights Steve slept over when they were younger and his mother was working late at the hospital, when Bucky would put the couch cushions on the floor in front of the small fireplace and wrap himself around Steve, his chest rising and falling against Steve’s back, helping him take deep, steady breaths despite the cold air cutting through his lungs like a knife. Or when he moved in with Steve for a few months after his mother’s funeral, pretending an irreconcilable argument with one of his sisters until he was sure Steve was back on his feet (“Well,” he’d said, grinning ruefully when Steve confronted him about this later, “You’d have saved me a whole lot of trouble if you’d just come and stayed with us like I asked.”). There simply wouldn’t be a Steve Rogers if it wasn’t for Bucky Barnes, and that was the truth.

And so it gutted him to see Bucky like this. He first noticed the difference on the march back to camp: something harder behind his eyes, his expression closing off at odd moments in a conversation, and the dark, distant look that settled on his face when he thought Steve couldn’t see. It bothered him, of course, but a lot of the other men of the 107th wore the same haunted look, and he told himself that things would get better when they were back behind their lines.

They didn’t. Steve almost missed how the smile died on Bucky’s face after he called “Let’s hear it for Captain America!” when they finally arrived at the camp, but he couldn’t ignore the new biting, brittle edge to his friend’s humor, or the way he seemed to have stopped caring about his appearance. Back in New York, Bucky had always kept himself dapper, with never a hair out of place and clothes as sharp as as a working man could keep them. It was alarming to see him in his tattered uniform, unshaven, with his hair unkempt even after they had reached the relative safety of London.

The last straw had been watching him try to flirt with Agent Carter in the pub. In the normal course of things, it should have worked. He ought to have coaxed a smile out of her, at least (even an exasperated one), but there was nothing behind the words, no panache, no extra helping of charm, and it was all too easy for her attention to slide off of him, as though he was nothing more than a stick of furniture. It was like watching him go through the motions of being Bucky Barnes, but it was all hollow - a sham, an act to keep up while his thoughts and his heart were somewhere else entirely.

Steve had to step back into the main room of the pub, for the noise, for another ineffectual drink, for a heavy dose of reality. When he came back, Bucky was gone.

* * *

There was nothing for it but to look for him, and Steve was frankly disconcerted when he found Bucky in the first place he looked. He was sitting by himself at the end of the long, narrow room with two rows of empty beds where the soldiers were billeted, just sitting and staring into the space between his knees. Steve thought it would have been better if he’d been drinking or smoking - if he’d been doing anything at all, really.

“Bucky?” he said.

His friend’s head jerked up, and he looked around, quick and wary like a dog scenting the air. “Hey, Steve.” The smile came just a little too late. “What can I do for America?”

“You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?” Steve sat down on the bed next to Bucky’s. The springs creaked loudly under his weight - another of the post-serum changes that he was still getting used to.

“Come on, I wasn’t even gone for a year, and you were dressing up in tights and dancing with chorus girls - dancing _onstage_. Didn’t I tell you not to do anything stupid till I got back?”

Steve shrugged. “You must have left some stupid behind, after all.”

“I guess so. Remember where we went the night before I shipped out?”

“The Stark Expo - how could I forget? Hey, wouldn’t it be something if Howard Stark had a flying car for us tomorrow?”

Bucky brushed this off. “I thought he said it would take a few years. Remember the date I found for you?”

Steve felt a distant twinge of guilt. What he really remembered was ditching her and Bucky to enlist, and, miracle of miracles, meeting Dr. Erskine. He screwed his eyes shut as he tried to recall the rest of that night. “She was blonde, pretty, taller than me. Or she _was_.” He turned, meaning to share the joke, but the grin stopped halfway through when he saw how Bucky was watching him. There was a wariness in that gaze that had the hairs standing up on the back of his neck. “Her name was Bonnie, and she didn’t want any popcorn - or not from me, anyway,” he went on carefully. “Is this a test?"

“Maybe - I don’t know - yes!” Bucky clutched at his head as if it was hurting him, swung his legs to the other side of the narrow bed and strode away to stand by the far wall with his back to his friend. “Steve - God, half the time I know I’m _here_ and the other half I’m expecting to wake up strapped to that table again.”

He was shaking. Steve went to him, wanting to reach out, to hug him or at least touch his shoulder, but one of the things he _had_ learned about being bigger was that it was so much easier to be seen as a threat, and that was the last thing Bucky needed in this state. So he kept his distance, and settled for asking, “What did they do to you?”

“You saw that place. I don’t know what those goons had or how they did it, but they - they messed with my head. Picked it apart. They went in there and looked for the worst thing they could do to me. And they found it. And used it.” Bucky closed his eyes, turned away from Steve as if it hurt to look at him. “They took away the ground beneath my feet.”

“Bucky.” There was nothing else he could say. Steve’s throat closed up in a way that hadn’t happened since the serum injections, and he choked on the name and everything he felt with it.

“You’re not helping.” He whirled around and waved a hand at Steve, a sweeping, exaggerated gesture that took in all of his new height and then some. “God, Steve, you were a skinny little shrimp when I left. You couldn’t run a block without running out of breath. And now you’re a - a fucking giant and you’re storming Nazi bases by yourself and _winning_. Can you blame me for thinking they’re just screwing with my mind again?”

“This is real, Buck. _I’m_ real.”

But he was shaking his head, and it was only too obvious that Steve’s simple insistence did a fat lot of nothing. He needed _proof_ , and if he could see it and touch it, so much the better. That was hard to come by when they were so far from home and so much had changed, but it occurred to Steve that there were some things he carried with him.

After the serum, he’d noticed that his injuries healed much faster, leaving no trace that they’d been there at all, but he had a veritable treasure trove of old hurts. The evidence could hardly be seen on what he thought of as his new skin, but it was there, if you knew where to look.

“Here.” He gave Bucky his right hand, palm down, and pointed out four fine, barely-there lines of scar tissue running across the back of it. “That cat someone tried to drown in a water barrel, remember? The one with claws like a tiger? And,” - he hastily rolled up his sleeve to reveal another mark, jagged and faint, on his forearm - “Jasper Nordsoe coming at me with a broken bottle. He got a jab in before you laid him out with that stool.”

The corner of Bucky’s mouth quirked upwards in a passable approximation of his old, easy smiles. “And I swore I’d never take you to a bar again.”

“Yeah. Didn’t help that I couldn’t drink half a bottle without throwing up, right? And look-”

Steve pointed out mark after mark, reliving the circumstances that had caused each one (Bucky had been there for most of them), and soon, driven by his friend _finally_ responding, he was taking off his shirt to show Bucky constellations of chicken pox scars and the place that marked where they’d taken out his appendix.

“I feel like St. Thomas,” Bucky joked, running his fingers over the pale line and its perpendicular stitch marks on his abdomen. “Oh Lord, I believe.”

Something about his touch raised goosebumps on Steve’s skin, and he shivered in a way that had nothing to do with being half naked in a cold room. That was silly. This was far from the first time he’d undressed in front of the other man, and it _definitely_ wasn’t the first time he’d felt that funny twist in his gut around Bucky. It had never been this hard to ignore, though. _I almost lost him,_ he thought, and that made everything sharper.

“See?” he said, trying to laugh at his friend’s light blasphemy. “It just takes a little getting used to - I know _I’m_ still having trouble steering. Can I put my shirt on now?”

“Hang on.” Bucky’s fingers were now spread against his stomach. “You know, I - I didn’t want to think when HYDRA had me. Thinking _hurt,_ and it let them in, but you can’t turn your brain off, not forever, not when they’re jolting it full of mind rays.” He swallowed, moved his hand to Steve’s side, holding him in place. “You have no idea--”

“I know I don’t.” Steve laid his hand over Bucky’s. “I _hate_ that I don’t. And I hate that I didn’t get there sooner--”

“I wasn’t talking about that, you punk.” Bucky tightened his grip, pulling an unresisting Steve closer.

“You weren’t?” Of all the strange things that had happened to him, Steve though that the strangest by far was having to look _down_ at his best friend when he was so used to craning his neck _up_. It was more apparent now that they were standing toe-to-toe, and the view, well, it was fascinating: the line of his nose, his chin, the corners of his mouth...

Bucky licked his lips. “Nope.”

Quite suddenly, Steve wasn’t looking at Bucky as though he was seeing him for the first time, because the man was kissing him, holding him like he was the only stable thing in a crazy, shifting world, and Steve wrapped his arms around him as he kissed him back, glorying in the rasp of Bucky’s stubble and his warm, skillful mouth.

 _That_ was a first.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I played fast and loose with the effects of the Super Soldier serum here. Do forgive!


End file.
